Data usage at UK's Glastonbury Festival smashes expectations

For the uninitiated, the UK's Glastonbury Festival is one of the largest music festivals in the world, which nowadays means it is one of the most data-hungry festivals too. Even with that in mind, this year's event, which ran for five days last week, was something of a data blowout.

As we reported before the event, Glastonbury's communications partner EE was expecting festival-goers to consume around 15 TB of data and had installed "the world's largest and most powerful temporary 4G network" to meet this demand. This included adding a sixth temporary mobile antenna and tripling the 4G spectrum capacity that was provided in comparison to the previous year's event.

In fact, over the course of the festival, the 175,000 people on-site used 70 percent more data than predicted. Around 25 TB were consumed in total, which is 130 percent more than was used at last year's festival. To put that in perspective, attendees at the Coachella music festival in the US earlier in the year reportedly chewed through 29.2 TB of data, but that was over a total of six days.

Of the data consumed, EE says 5 TB was used for uploading content, which equates to about 22 million photos being shared. Data usage is said to have peaked on Friday morning during the announcement of the UK referendum result and during Coldplay's set on the festival's iconic Pyramid Stage.

Among EE's other provisions at Glastonbury were Wi-Fi-enabled topiary artworks around which festival-goers could get online without using any of their own data, phone-charging services and a virtual reality experience for the festival. The latter saw 360-degree content filmed around the site and shown to festival-goers via virtual reality headsets while they were waiting for their devices to be charged.